So engrossed was she in the report and her own thoughts that the time passed quickly and Mike Collins finally got back to her on virtually the dot of 9 a.m., before she’d made her planned second call to his office.
‘I’m really sorry, Detective Superintendent,’ he began. ‘Court finished late yesterday and I didn’t get your message until this morning because—’
Karen interrupted him there. She was neither interested in excuses nor incriminations. She just wanted to get on with it.
‘Spare me your life story, please,’ she said curtly. ‘I just want the full report of an inquest into the death of a young soldier — by the name of Jocelyn Slade — about six months ago, and I want it straight away.’
She also asked Collins, too new in his job to even have a chance of being able to remember off the top of his head, to search records for an inquest on a soldier called Trevor, who had allegedly committed suicide at Hangridge a further six months or so earlier, and indeed to look for any other deaths connected with the barracks or the Devonshire Fusiliers.
Perhaps anxious now to prove his efficiency, the newly appointed coroner’s clerk emailed her the requested report on Jocelyn Slade’s inquest within minutes, and promised to get back to her as soon as possible on her other request.
The Jocelyn Slade inquest came as a bombshell to Karen. Unlike the inquest into Craig Foster’s death, it did not just raise some procedural points and leave a few doubts hanging in the air. It was a revelation. Slade had allegedly shot herself with her SA80 rifle while on sentry duty at Hangridge main gates. Once again the coroner, now retired, seemed to have accepted the findings of the SIB investigation, that Jocelyn Slade had killed herself, without any discernible further inquiry. He pronounced a verdict of suicide in spite of evidence presented, which Karen, this time, considered to be highly questionable.
As she read, Karen could hardly believe her eyes. Jocelyn had been shot in the head five times. The SA80 was an automatic weapon. Karen had completed the obligatory police firearms courses and was, in fact, not at all a bad shot. She understood that an automatic used in a suicide attempt could continue to fire even after the first shot might well have done its job. But five hits? That was pushing it. And she noted that the investigation did not include any information on the angle of the shots, merely indicating that they had all been fired from close quarters, leading to the suicide verdict.
It was not satisfactory at all. And there was more. The second sentry on duty, at the entrance to the officers’ mess a hundred yards or so away from where Jocelyn Slade had been on duty, Private James Gates, had been called to give evidence. He said that he had heard shots and called the duty sergeant, who ordered a search of the perimeter area of Hangridge. But at first no body had been found, even though more than one soldier had several times passed right by the spot where Jocelyn’s body was eventually discovered.
Incompetence? Panic? All involved had, after all, been young and inexperienced. But Karen was not convinced. She considered the coroner’s verdict to have been, at the very least, highly unsatisfactory.
She had, of course, known Torbay’s former coroner, albeit only vaguely. And she was aware that Reginald Sykes had been an army officer himself, practising law within the military, before moving into civilian life as a solicitor in Torquay and ultimately becoming a coroner. Actually, even someone who did not know that would probably have guessed something of Sykes’ military past. In total contrast to Gerrard Parker-Brown, she remembered Sykes as being something of a cliché on legs. With his small bristly moustache, accent you could cut with a knife and exaggeratedly upright bearing, he really had been a complete stereotype, old-style army officer.
She read the report several times, trying to imagine what could have happened to Jocelyn Slade. She wanted to call the chief constable straight away, but she made herself be patient, at least until she had heard back from the coroner’s clerk concerning any other deaths connected with Hangridge.
Only a couple of hours later Mike Collins called. She didn’t know him, but she knew the type. He had been a police officer, in common with many coroners’ clerks, and he was the sort who liked to demonstrate the failings of others, particularly if he felt that he had been dealt with critically himself, as he might well after the way Karen had spoken to him earlier. One way and another, Mike Collins was not the kind of man Karen liked a bit. But the truth was that she couldn’t have wished for a better person to be trolling through the court’s records.
‘Found him,’ said Collins triumphantly. ‘Fusilier Trevor Parsons, died just over a year ago. Verdict, suicide, like you said. Hard to believe that any coroner could have presided over three cases like this of young people from the same barracks, and not at least passed comment, isn’t it?’
Collins was only voicing Karen’s sentiments, but from him the comment sounded smug and self-satisfied. Quite deliberately, she did not respond. Instead she merely checked if he had unearthed any other Devonshire Fusilier cases. He hadn’t.
‘Fine, thank you,’ she said curtly. ‘So, just email me the report on Parsons, please.’
‘Already done it,’ said Collins, sounding even smugger.
Karen couldn’t wait to hang up and read the records of Parsons’ inquest. The similarities both with the death of Jocelyn Slade and the way in which such investigation as there was had been handled by the SIB, were immediately evident. Karen could feel the excitement coursing through her body.
Trevor Parsons, a seventeen-year-old recruit, had allegedly shot himself while on sentry duty at Hangridge and, like Jocelyn Slade, had died from multiple gunshot wounds, in his case three such wounds. The only witness called had been the young soldier he had been standing guard with, who had reported only hearing gunfire and then finding Parsons’ body when he went to investigate.
Karen spent just a few minutes assimilating the information and rehearsing how she was going to present it, before eventually calling the chief constable. As ever, she did not relish any dealings at all with Harry Tomlinson.
He kept her waiting for almost five minutes before eventually coming on the line, something he quite often did with her and which she suspected was quite deliberate.
Telling herself that the most important thing with Tomlinson was never to let him get to you, she explained the events so far as calmly and as succinctly as she could. Tomlinson listened without interrupting, and continued to say nothing even when she deliberately paused to allow him the chance to chip in. He was, she thought, giving nothing away.
And when she finally got to the real aim of her call, she still had no idea at all of how he might react.
‘I really do think we should initiate a police inquiry at Hangridge, now,’ she said finally. ‘I am not at all happy with the way the military investigations have been conducted, nor with at least one of the coroner’s verdicts.’
‘Karen, surely these are military matters, don’t we have enough crime to deal with?’